This week at Turning Pointe Dance, dancers will come home with student evaluations, with recommended class placements for the fall entered into online portals by May 8. With this, both tension and emotions will be on the rise! But these sheets aren’t meant to be a point of stress. They’re meant to be a checkpoint of encouragement, designed to keep our students safe and developing properly in a way that honors our studio’s uniquely gospel-driven mission. If you’re having trouble navigating these waters, here are our top tips for processing your progress reports.
1. Keep Some Perspective
They say most despair can be solved with a little dose of perspective. The same can be said for handling success with humility and grace. Regardless of what your student evaluations say, it’s important to see the picture, and not just the paper.
While this time of year puts heavy focus on completing a grade level and moving on to a new class, it’s important to remember that dance does not run parallel with school. While the expected duration of each grade is one year, each level in dance typically requires 2-3 years to master. At Turning Pointe, our most advanced classes reach Level 5—a number less than half the number of years in a traditional journey from elementary school to high school graduation.
Ultimately our goal for each student is advancement through proficiency, but at each level, we don’t just focus on technique and mastery of skills. We’re training and developing the whole person, body, mind, and spirit. There’s so much more happening in each class than a piece of paper or a class placement can represent! It’s so important to keep that in mind.
And because God made each and every one of us so very differently, it is both possible and necessary to assign a dance development level based on readiness. That means students aren’t moved up based on age or time-served, but rather on their proficiency in the targets of technique, concepts and etiquette set forth in our carefully developed curriculum. Simply put, each level builds upon the skills developed in the level prior, so dancers are asked to master their level targets before it is safe to advance, and each student advances at his or her own pace.
2. Acknowledge the Purpose
Believe it or not, student evaluations are meant to be an encouragement! They provide a valuable checkpoint, feedback on where each dancer has improved, and where they should shift their focus next. But the primary reason for evaluating students each year? To keep them safe! Dancers who don't master essential skills in the curriculum in one level before moving to the next run a significant risk of injury. Without a proper foundation, the walls of what we’re building will fall. As artists, our bodies are our tools, so it’s important to honor God’s creation (that’s you!) by keeping it healthy and safe. So while a student might say they already know all the steps they’re doing in class, proficiency in technique is in the details. It’s not just about knowing what to do, it’s about consistently doing something well—well enough to build upon safely in the next steps of advancement.
It’s also important to remember that setbacks and hurt aren’t always physical. Students who are moved up before they’re ready will struggle to keep up in their next classes, lose confidence, experience burnout, or begin to resent or dread coming to class. Dancers progress at their own individual rates. Some skills come easier to some than others. We want to encourage the overall health, both mentally and physically, that’s required for safe progression. The purpose is not to break up friend groups, to discourage students or to cultivate frustration. The purpose is to place each student in the right setting and teaching environment to experience safe and successful advancement that fosters a love of dancing, a love of God, and a love of the arts.
3. Practice Your Patience
Easier said than done, right? But all year long we’ve been studying the progression of growth, from the cultivation of soil to the eventual celebration of harvest. In doing so, each class has talked through and prayed over each devotional prompt. You see, no two flowers bloom at the same time—even those planted right next to each other. As you process your feedback, remember that we pray through these principles in class not just to talk the talk, but to walk the walk with Him. Growth happens in God’s time, and now is the perfect time to put the concepts we’ve studied into practice.
If your progress report isn’t what you thought it would be, remember this month’s focus: He is the vine, we are the branches. Apart from Him, we wither. If we place the weight of our value in any other hands (like a progress report), we replant ourselves away from our source of life, and we’re sentencing ourselves to frustration and disappointment. But if we remain in Him, trust His plan and trust this process, choosing instead to work within the wait for our advancement to the next level, His reward is promised, and the harvest season is coming. If you’re climbing up the ladder of development, remember why God calls us up to bloom. Spoiler alert: It’s not for our own glory or benefit.
4. Approach it with Prayer
This one is last, but not least. In fact, it’s above all else.
God calls us to pray for our enemies and love those who persecute us, but oftentimes we think of “enemies” as the “bad guys” in the movies. But in real life, our persecutors aren’t people out to get us. There aren’t big screen villains, just people competing for the same things. That is, dancers in a season of joy while we’re in a season of sorrow. And it leads to jealousy, comparison, and resentment. We fall into thoughts of: “Why did that person move up and not me?” “I’ve been in this class longer than them, why do they get to move up?” or “I’m x-y-z years old, why aren’t I getting the same opportunities as the other students my age?” “What am I doing wrong?” “Why aren’t I good enough?” That is of course what we say, because we’re human. We live in a fallen world. But what does the Bible say? According to scripture, now is the time to rejoice. And now is the time to rejoice together.
A classmate or friend who got moved up is not your enemy. They are not against you, and neither is your teacher. God calls us to pray for one another, and to love our neighbors as ourselves. So approach each progress report in prayer—not just for ourselves, for our own reactions and our own hurt, but for the success of others. That the body of Christ as a whole would thrive in His name, however that looks.
The Bible also instructs us to strive each day to be more like Jesus, and He never compared Himself to others, or showed jealousy toward His fellow men. We dance each day to reflect our Heavenly Father—the one who planted these dreams of dancing in our hearts, and the one we now trust to see those plans through. Lastly, scripture states there is an appointed time for ALL things. These are more than lessons in dancing. They’re lessons in faith, and in life, understanding the value of working hard, holding fast to a dream despite the obstacles in a given moment, and the joy of encouraging and strengthening those around us.
So as we walk through this week together, we look forward to helping our students develop, grow, and advance towards their dreams as we hold fast to the goals and mission of our unique studio environment.
Thank you for entrusting Turning Pointe Dance with your unique story. Thank you for trusting the process and the development of the whole person in each of our students. Thank you for counting it all joy as we all work to praise His name with dancing!